November 19th, 2013

Here’s a textbook case of the liberal mindset. Jessica Sanford of western Washington state was so happy with the initial Obamacare premiums she was quoted by the state website that she sent off a grateful letter to President Obama which he featured in a speech three weeks ago. But since then, Sanford’s been informed—well, you have to read the Byzantine story for yourself, because it’s still not all that clear how much Sanford will be actually end up paying for herself and her 14-year-old son who has ADHD, because the news keeps changing.

The one constant is that the news is not good. First she was informed her subsidy would be less than she originally was told, but it was still something she thought she could swing. Next she was told no subsidy would be forthcoming at all, because her son had been enrolled in Medicaid and that meant her income level was figured as though she were a single person, which disqualified her for subsidies. Then she was told her son’s Medicaid enrollment could be rescinded if she liked. But that turns out to be difficult to actually accomplish, although one customer in the state of Washington has apparently been able to do it—so there’s hope, right?

Sanford is upset, but it’s clear who she doesn’t blame—President Obama:

I don’t want to be bashing the president. I don’t want to be bashing the ACA. I don’t want to come across as saying that. I’m a big Obama fan.

But to me there’s a big problem with the way the state is handling it. You put your stuff in there and once you do it, it is impossible to do anything…So you are stuck on this big treadmill of bureaucracy, and you know, if feels very out of control.

Yes, it’s the state’s fault, because of course—as everyone knows—the federal bureaucracy is so much homier and cozier, and what’s going on right now in the state of Washington re Obamacare has nothing to do with the feds, nothing at all.

Sanford is really a perfect example of the difficulty of changing a mind and a political affiliation. People often resist making the connections that would cause the feeling of discombobulation that would come from having to give up previous notions of the good and the bad, and the need to change political affiliations as a result.

I’m not surprised by the bureaucracy and the screw-ups she has encountered—or even by Sanford’s tendency to stand by her man and her party. But there’s another part of this story that did astound me, which is that a single woman making $50K a year and having one child would qualify for Medicaid for the child. Here are the rules (I’m not sure whether this is just the way the state of Washington does it, or if these are the rules for any state that has accepted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare): at up to 200% of poverty level, children are automatically enrolled in Medicaid when the family signs up at the state exchange. From 200% to 250% of family poverty level, children are eligible to do so but enrollment is optional, and the parent must pay premiums of $20 a month per child (capped at $40 per month for total children). From 250% to 300% of poverty level, enrollment is also optional, and premiums are $30 a month per child.

That’s a lot of kids qualifying for Medicaid. Take a look at this chart for the poverty guidelines:

Notice, for example, that a family of four (a couple with two children, let’s say) would be forced to enroll its two children in Medicaid if the couple’s income was under $47,100, and the couple’s own premiums would now be figured as though they were a family of two, which would decrease their subsidies. Using this general calculator for Obamacare, and if the couple were Sanford’s age of 48, a family of four with that income would pay $2964 a year out-of-pocket for silver plan coverage, whereas a family of two with the same income would pay $4488 because their subsidies would be lower based on their higher percentage of poverty level. So by enrolling the children in Medicaid (which would be compulsory), the family loses $1524 a year, at least for premiums (which might be offset by reduced co-pays and deductibles, however; that’s a more complex calculation, because a family under 250% of poverty level gets a reduction in the usual co-pays and deductibles on the exchange plans, as well).

It also means that same family of 4 making up to $70650 a year (300% of poverty level) would be able to enroll its children in Medicaid for a small fee if they so chose. That sort of income for a couple with two children isn’t exactly wealthy, but Medicaid? Of course, Medicaid is such third-class insurance that not many people in the $70K category would willingly choose it—especially since, by taking the Medicaid option for their children, they’d be paying $8580 out-of-pocket for their own insurance (which would now be figured as a couple only) versus the $6708 they’d be paying as a family of four (after subsidies, which they would be eligible for as a family but not as a couple).

One of the many things wrong with Obamacare is that the subsidy structure contains a vast number of inequities such as this. Even if you agree with the basic idea—as Sanford seems to—the anomalies are legion in practice. Some may be intentional but some seem unintentional and random and even perverse. Plus, the complexity is immense, and the opportunities to game the system for those who master that complexity are immense as well. And this is true without even figuring in the similarly vast opportunities for fraud.

Bruce Barcott, who also lives in Washington state and also was a big Obama supporter, got a similarly rude awakening to Sanford’s. Although the details are somewhat different, and he never wrote a letter of thanks to the president that he now has to walk back, he’s unexpectedly much worse off after Obamacare than before.

Barcott has a friend in a similar fix who called a lawyer-accountant for advice and was told this:

I can’t ethically advise you, because honestly I don’t know the right thing to do. Nobody does. There are no answers. Right now it’s a complete clusterfuck.

Now, there’s an honest man.

But unlike Sanford, Barcott is angry at Obama. And he even understands the irony of it:

Once the sound of boiling blood dissipated, in my head I heard my Republican friends chuckling at the sight of a liberal Democrat hoisted ten stories high on his own petard. How’s the view up there, Obamacare Ollie?

One of the interesting things about what’s happening in the individual insurance market is that many of these people are self-employed self-starters, some of them (like Barcott) are freelance writers. They are articulate. And they write. I don’t know whether Barcott’s mugging by Obamacare reality will lead to deeper realizations and changes in his basic political beliefs, but I think with someone like him there’s a chance.

“Sanford is really a perfect example of the difficulty of changing a mind . . . .”

In the many debates I have with people, I don’t think I’ve ever successfully changed my opponents opinion, or they mine , on the basis of argument alone (practical evidence and demonstration is another matter). We become wedded to certain beliefs and I suspect the bottom line is the difficulty for anyone to recognize that the three most difficult words in the English language are: “I was wrong.

i’ve also noted that the individual insurance market is full of writers, artists, agents, contractors, actors and others who might be inclined to support Obama. Due to the crappy regulation of health insurances (meaning inflexible not too weak!) it is hard to get individual insurance sometimes. The choices are not wide and the providers are often limited. So this is a market Obamacare should have been targeted at. Instead it is promoted as if it were Medicaid to a true poor population. Wasn’t anyone paying attention during the drafting of OCare?

Sanford reminds me of Eric J. Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian. He admitted that in the 1960s he realized communism wasn’t working but he kept promoting it anyway because he couldn’t admit he had been fooled. It would have been too humiliating. He was a real smart intellectual and he had been duped but he wasn’t about to admit it. I think a lot of the Obama supporters are in the same situation. They aren’t about to admit they were taken in by a slick talking con man.

“It’s easier to fool people, than to convince them they have been fooled.” —Mark Twain

Dialog from the movie, “The Wild Bunch”
Pike Bishop: A hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just can’t stand to be wrong.
Dutch Engstrom: Pride.
Pike Bishop: And they can’t forget it… that pride… being wrong. Or learn by it

Aside from the impact that the actual provisions in O’care has on people, what leapt out at me from the story was just how convoluted the computations, and thus the decision making becomes, once you enter the bureaucratic laberynth. Of course anyone who has tried to do an income tax return that deviates at all from the basic cookie-cutter is not surprised.

Found this excerpt from Madison as published in Federalist #62. It fortells many of the problems that we face today. Those old fellows actually understood.

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be tomorrow”
James Madison, Federalist #62

Aside from the impact that the actual provisions in O’care has on people, what leapt out at me from the story was just how convoluted the computations, and thus the decision making becomes, once you enter the bureaucratic labyrinth. Of course anyone who has tried to do an income tax return that deviates at all from the basic cookie-cutter is not surprised.

Found this excerpt from Madison as published in Federalist #62. It foretold many of the problems that we face today. Those old fellows actually understood.

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be tomorrow”
James Madison, Federalist #62

I live in Virginia and the reason Terry McAuliffe was elected governor was because of the female vote. The democrats ran election ads claiming the republicans wanted to ban birth control and abortion. The ads worked. Young single females voted overwhelmingly for McAuliffe.

I hadn’t really followed the story except enough to roll my eyes, and was about to come here and offer my sympathies that perhaps Sanford didn’t want to put up with being hassled by other blacks for not supporting the 1st black president. Imagine my surprise when I clicked on the link and saw she was white.

“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing.” Thomas Jefferson

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, it is instinctual to turn to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” George Orwell

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll

It’s not stupidity but ignorance, priorities and beliefs. People vote according to their awareness, priorities and beliefs. Young single childless women highly value their modern ‘option’ of sexual freedom without the potential consequence of pregnancy and the ‘safety valve’ of the availability of abortion. Single mother’s, the security of the nanny state.

Sanford is really a perfect example of the difficulty of changing a mind and a political affiliation. People often resist making the connections that would cause the feeling of discombobulation that would come from having to give up previous notions of the good and the bad, and the need to change political affiliations as a result.

Whittaker Chambers comments on a similar phenomenon in Witness regarding people leaving the Communist Party. While people may drift away (or more likely have never been seriously committed in the first place), the number of people that knew why they became a member of the Communist Party and then made a conscious thoughtful decision to leave the party were very few.

Long ago orphanages could deal with the problem because there were so few (relatively) out of wedlock births. Social taboos kept the problem of single motherhood at a manageable level. As we all know, that is no longer the case.

“Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”” Edmund Burke

Obamacare will steamroller the economy, negatively impact the daily lives of all but the super wealthy and the political class, and in the end it may be a good thing; although it will also hit those of us who knew better. Still, I see no other way to turn back towards the fundamentals of a society largely composed of free and responsible individuals who realize they are the masters of their fates. Indiviudals must feel the pain and wake up. Otherwise, on the 100th anniversary of Gettysburg, we must contemplate another great schism.

IMO, the 2014-16 elections are the last opportunity for this purported ‘center right’ country to awaken without “another great schism”. If at the least, a slim majority of the American public does not reject the democrats in those elections, we shall look back to discover that the schism was already upon us, even now.

For if ‘transformation’ to socialism is what they seek to impose upon us, rebellion is what they shall have and, “if this be treason, make the most of it”.

I am OK, health-insurance-wise because I am on Tricare, as a military vet. The regular charges have gone up over this past year, but only slightly – and even if they go up exponentially (as they are predicted to do in the near future – hey, thanks Obama-administration for looking after military vets!) – I can still afford them. And because of where I am, I am seen at the showcase hospital/clinic for military medicine.

Still – I am still one of those indy artists/writers. Having to write out that increased monthly/quarterly payment will hurt and hurt big, and I don’t think too many indy-intellectual media types (at least the verbally articulate ones) will let this all pass without comment. Bitter comment, at the very least.

My daughter is one of those who searched out and purchased at some expense to herself, one of those affordable insurance plans. 87$ a month, from Humana – she’s a basically healthy 30-something, aside from some minor damage done to her by military medicine while serving two hitches in the Marines. At the end of next year, if the un-ACA still stands, she will have to pay $230 for an ACA-compliant policy. She isn’t going to do it. Can’t afford, and the thought of giving over all that personal information is totally repugnant.
So – interesting time, eh?

As an aside – I had single-payer health care for 20 years in the catch as best can military system. Better than nothing, but still … nothing to write home about, and there are people I know who had perfectly horrendous experiences with the system as it stood.

“One of the many things wrong with Obamacare is that the subsidy structure contains a vast number of inequities such as this.”
I just love Neo’s irony. A vast number indeed. But who but blindered Dems would ever think Ocare was about equity?

Charity and sympathy toward Sanford and her kid are luxury items. As socialists ruin the economy, it no longer grows. The pie either stays the same or shrinks.
When it comes down to a choice between your own family or Sanford’s, is there any doubt of the outcome?
I’m afraid we’re going to see a return to humanity’s base nature really soon.

Sgt. Mom: “As an aside – I had single-payer health care for 20 years in the catch as best can military system. Better than nothing, but still … nothing to write home about, and there are people I know who had perfectly horrendous experiences with the system as it stood.”

I made a similar comment some time back. Those of us who had military careers learned what single payer meant. “Better than nothing, but not much.” I am one who has two horror stories to tell – too lengthy to go into here. Based on my experience I’ve long argued against universal health care or guv’mint health care whenever the topic comes up.

Many of these people, like Jessica Sanford and Bruce Barcott, may have to go naked, as in uninsured when the math doesn’t add up. It is a terrible irony that this law, which was supposed to insure the uninsured, may well result in many more people becoming uninsured. Those who can’t afford insurance can still fall back on EMTALA (I don’t think it’s been repealed) and present themselves at ERs for routine treatment. Too many people do that today. (Mostly poor immigrants [both legal and illegal] that do it now.) More such patients and the unreimbursed hospital costs will keep going up.

Why didn’t the geniuses that dreamed up this scheme understand that few middle class people can afford to spend 15-25% of their income on heath care insurance premiums? And that the increased deductibles mean people will have to pay off their medical bills on time payment plans – more outlays that few can afford. Talk about a tax increase! The progressives have been harping on increasing people’s spending as a way to stimulate the economy. Taking this much spending money out of people’s pockets to cover health care is not going to stimulate the economy – just the opposite.

Geoffrey Britain, 7:42 pm — “IMO, the 2014-16 elections are the last opportunity for this purported ‘center right’ country to awaken without ‘another great schism’.”

Seriously, I thought that was the 2012 election. And I continue to think that. It’s too late now.

No, I’m not going to withdraw into my cocoon and hibernate (mixed metaphor?). I will speak out and write and otherwise fight the good fight, to keep a flame of sanity alive for future generations, including my and your children’s children.

But for the time being, it’s too late. Look at what’s transpired between Nov 2012 and Nov 2013. The optimistic view is to extrapolate linearly, as in, it’ll be three more years of just-as-bad for 2014, 2015, and 2016. Added up, that’s four times as much accumulated disaster as what we had facing us in Nov 2012.

A more pessimistic view might have it extrapolate exponentially, as in the “wheat and chessboard problem” referenced by neo in the other thread for today (“The LA Times”, neo-neocon, 7:11 pm).

Do the math! With 2013 = 2^0, or 1,

2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 added up become

2^0 + 2^1 + 2^2 + 2^3;

add ’em all up, and it’s 1 + 2 + 4 + 8, or 15 . . .

fifteen times as bad as what we’re seeing now. Fortunately, it’s a teeny weeny chessboard.

[Dear reader is invited to use his/her own base for the exponentiation; “2” is not sacrosanct.]

A problem of changing minds is that the Democats and Left have fashioned their belief system as a quasi-religious binary moral edifice that is resistant to criticism and convinced their followers that the only alternative is a strawman-and-ad-hominem demonized Republicans and the Right. Good v Evil.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a psychology experiment was performed on typically indoctrinated Democrats to measure their reactions to ‘Enemies’ and they responded more strongly to Republican than Terrorist.

For the Democrats, votes *against* the GOP work just as well as votes *for* Democrats.

There are some Events that are so shocking that the Sleeper Awakes — and is appalled to see who he’s in bed with. Then he starts to try to remember what he drank the night before, and how much . . .

In my case, the Shock was September 11th and being an eyewitness of the same. Now, I didn’t change my mind about the Dimwits overnight (I was a Democrat but never a Leftist, and always loathed Communism): In fact, when a lefty friend of mine said on Sept. 12th that she was “glad Bush is president — at least he’ll fight back,” I was genuinely shocked.

Started by being a liberal hawk. BUT: once you question One Big Thing about the Left, you start to wonder — what about this other Big Thing they assert? and when you find out they lied about that, too — well, what about this third Big Thing? did they lie about that, too?

Once that process is started, it’s like following Injun Joe’s trail out of the cave: you keep getting closer and closer to the light.

I also liken it to someone who’s happily married for years, or at least comfortably — but then sees their spouse necking with someone else at a party, and they’re not even drunk. This is a lightning stroke that clarifies the entire terrible landscape with a flash.

OBAMAcare has the makings of being just such a lightning strike. You don’t need to refute the whole argument, just firmly yank out one major linchpin. The rest will follow, for many many folks.

One more thing: I do believe, since I grew up in God’s Country (which is what we in “flyover country” call our turf), I suspect that the allegiance of most of the Dimocrat voters –most– is rather shallowly rooted in being in with the In Crowd.

When this salt cod of Reality hits them upside the head, they will abandon the Dims in droves. We’re already seeing it.

What we need to do, I submit, is make the case, again, for the American Way. Which, after all, is responsible for our rapid rise to be the freest, wealthiest, and most powerful people on this planet. Why not try THAT as a sales pitch? After all, what do our enemies have? Sordid socialism? yuck. What losers.

Beverly, this is a question to which perhaps you should avoid for your own mental health, but why do you think people in the South loved Democrats and hated Republicans like Lincoln or the Northerner Sherman instead of blaming the people that had real power in the South after the war?

Did economic disaster cause the South to reflect on their ways and reject the politics of the Democrats that caused the war to begin with? Or did they just double down, until to this point, families in the South are still Democrat registered.

If anyone has wondered where the Democrat party came up with the idea of making blacks hate Republicans so blacks can keep loving their Democrat slave masters, look back at Reconstruction. An engineered failure, engineered by Democrats in both South and North. The Left did not exist as an alliance back then, so the ideology was different. It wasn’t out to kill patriotism, for one thing.

It’s a good thing humanity developed survival mechanisms against accepting reality. People can continue to fight on precisely because they deny the reality that they have already lost and will cease to exist regardless of what they do.

In the modern world, that has certain consequences though. Human beings developed self deception as a way to ensure that even a .01% chance of survival would not go unaccounted for due to lack of effort. So people try and try, no matter how many times they get beaten down, because the essence of “giving up” has become equivalent to “dying”.

“I am wrong” in essence becomes the same thing as saying “I’m dead anyways, might as well kill myself”.

The realities of Obamacare may not change committed dems minds. It will, however, change the minds of the “independents.” The math works out something like this. 30% hard core progressives, 30% hard core conservatives, and 40% mushy independents. The independents have been voting more for dems in national elections since 2008. In 2008 Obama won by roughly 9.5 million votes. In 2012 Obama won by roughly 5 million votes. With a total of 127 to 130 million voters, a swing of 5% one way or the other can win an election. People who call themselves independents (roughly 50 million people) tend to vote their interests. If just 10% of them see Obamacare as the Obamanation that it is, that can swing elections. That’s also why it’s so important that conservatives not stay at home when the R candidate doesn’t meet their ideological standards. The mushy middle wins or loses elections in this country – not the hard core extremes of right and left. I don’t like it, but it is a mathematical fact.

I think when debating, the psychology of opposition gets in the way of analysis. This doesn’t allow people to admit they’re wrong in the heat of the moment (unless they are a rare type of individual).
After the debate is over and emotions cool down, people may revisit the arguments in their mind and start persuading themselves. I’ve experienced the same thing myself, so I never entirely give up on the other side. You never know who may respond days, weeks or months later.
That’s one reason reality is a better persuader than we are: it is impersonal and doesn’t evoke an automatic defense mechanism.

I learned something interesting at the Obamacare premiums calculator that Neo linked to.

My husband and I are in our early 60s and retired, so we have individual health insurance. We saved a lot during our high-tech careers, figuring that social security was a lousy bet, so we’re pretty comfortable.

Our reported 1040 income is from dividends, capital gains, and IRA withdrawals. With the current mix, our income is too high to qualify for a subsidy, and the calculator says our health insurance premiums for a silver plan will come to about $15,000 per year.

But, we could easily shift our income sources, leaving money in the IRAs until we hit Medicare age, and instead spending from our non-IRA savings. If we played a few tricks like that, we could get our reported 1040 income down to the point at which the calculator says we’d qualify for a $9,000 per year subsidy — all completely legal.

I don’t think I’m the person the subsidies were intended to help, but if that’s what the law says, who am I to turn down free money?

An alternate argument, JJ, is that a candidate cannot win unless his base “knows” and trusts his principles. In other words, ensure the base then go get the independents. Otherwise, forget it. And of course McCain and Romney support that argument.

Obama had the “knows” part because his base always knew he was hard left even though he could be against homo marriage, against amnesty, and make statements supporting free markets and our military. The word “knows” is in quotation because the knowing is a knowing based on code and deception.

The hard Left knew Obama was their man. The Independents, low information as they are, did not know Obama was hard Left. And of course the media is the glue that cemented it all together.

I thought Romney had a bit of the “knows” part in him in that he was a stealth conservative candidate. But that deception is hard to play for a candidate who is essentially honest and forthright.

It is delicious to see the anger and concern of the Independents as they discovery, little by little, the duplicity of the information they received.

Neo, thanks for linking (again) to that video. That financial advisor points out exactly the kind of tactics I envisioned. And. as one of your commenters at the other post pointed out, taking advantage of legal provisions of this or any other tax law is all fair game.

Now, should I trust that O-care will be stable for long enough to make it worth actually acting on this? That’s a tough call right now.

To Eric: For one thing, the September 11th attacks affected me powerfully because I was an eyewitness — that’s a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful than seeing it on TV. It hit me personally, where I live.

Obamacare is hitting people personally, where they live. It’ll have a major effect on their lives, and they’ll have no say in it. It’s something that will be inflicted on them — a really awful feeling. So, yes, I think it will wake a lot of people up.

Since I grew up in the heartland, I’d peg the Leftwing nutjob faction (hardcore “progs”) at 20%, not 30%. I’ve seen others make that estimate, too.

Ymarsakar — War Between the States is Very complicated. Briefly: only 1% – 2% of all white Southerners owned slaves (US Census figures). So 98% of Southerners really WERE fighting for independence from the North, which had been kicking them around for many years. They had more money and more people, and were on an industrial vs. agricultural footing.

So yes, the slaveowners did light the fuse, but the bomb was the desire for independence.

Reconstruction was inflicted on the defeated and prostrate South by the hated Republicans, who (after Lincoln’s assassination) gave full rein to vengeance. The South was under military rule for several years. Famine was widespread. Black men were given the vote, but all white men who had either fought for the Confederacy or “given aid and comfort” to it were stripped of the right to vote. There were no civil courts, only Yankee-ruled military tribunals. All this after so many of the young men had died or been maimed by the hated Yankees: 1/4 of the state budget of Alabama after the war, e.g., was devoted to buying artificial limbs.

Reconstruction was dubbed “Re-destruction” by the Southerners. My great-great grandparents, a doctor and his wife in Georgia, died young from its aftereffects (famine = illness and death).

How can you imagine that my ancestors would look at someone like Sherman or Sheridan, who conducted the first real scorched-earth campaigns and inflicted such dreadful suffering, and embrace them? in what universe would that make sense?

Also, the Northerners screwed up badly by forcing the South to instantly accept the rule by their former slaves in the state legislatures, something no Northern state would accept in that day, by the way! and the disenfranchisement of all their white male citizenry. Impotent at that point to vent their anger at the white Northerners who’d put them in this humiliating position, they (I regret to say) vented it on the blacks instead. They went several bridges too far, too fast, and unfortunately the black Southerners reaped the bitter harvest.

I’m not saying it would have been easy to integrate former slaves, kept ignorant in most cases by their owners, into the society! but that was the worst way to do it, and guaranteed to foment rebellion.

IOW, the only flag Southerners could rally around after the war was their old Party.

This is also the reason that black Southerners, to a man, were Republicans, until the 1960s. I love to blow lefties’ minds by telling them Martin Luther King was a Republican. In fact, all the early black civil rights leaders in the South were, pretty much. Until LBJ flipped them. [Though they did vote for FDR.]

Here’s a little factoid for you about slavery. (I used to edit history books for a very prominent academic publisher, including several about the antebellum South, slavery, etc.)

In the 1860 Census, they reported that the yeoman farmer (owns his own farm) in the South had an annual cash income of $50. Fifty dollars. Bartering, growing their own food, etc., allowed them to survive.

In that same year, these were the prices for various types of slaves: for an old woman, $200 (for all these, remember they had to supply room, board, and clothing as well.) For a strong young man to work in the fields, $800. For a skilled slave who knew blacksmithing, carpentry, etc., $1,200. These latter men were often allowed to work off the plantation and earn their own money: they’d split it with their owners and keep some of it. That was one of the main ways the slaves were able to buy their emancipation and that of their families.

And at the war’s outbreak, some 9,000 black men in the South had slaves of their own. Probably most had bought kinfolk, but they also bought others — this was the system, and in Africa slavery was a well-known custom too, so they probably regarded it as just working their way up in the world.

What I’m saying, most Southerners couldn’t begin to afford a slave and didn’t really give a hoot about preserving the “peculiar institution,” but they hotly resented being told what to do about it by the Yankees. And Lincoln was explicit that his aim in fighting the Southern states was to bring them back under Union rule, NOT to free the slaves (that casus belli was stated later in the war).

I’m a NYer who was in NYC on 9/11. I witnessed 1st hand in the days immediately following 9/11 how the radical Left eagerly embraced the attack as an opportunity to resurrect their ‘Revolution’.

And how Democrats – fellow New Yorkers who were in the city on 9/11 – willfully resculpted the event in their minds to fit into their global Narrative. It was fascinating and distressing to watch their defense mechanism activate to protect their basic worldview.

Eric:
I know: but they were in the minority. Most New Yorkers, hell, even the Village Voice’s cover the next day was “BASTARDS!” in 70-point type — most of us pulled together and were deeply angry at the terrorists.

The Leftist bastards always try to upstage all the decent people, and too often succeed: but how many of them are there, really? even in New York City?

What did dishearten me about NY was that the city, after a surge of unaccustomed patriotism, slunk back to its despicable Liberal Asshat ways within a couple of months. I did notice, though, that Sheethead Sharpton was rebuked, by the black community! when he said the statue of the three firemen should be one black, one hispanic, and one white guy: even though the men were all white.

Alas, the bugger did seem to be able to prevent ANY statue from being made; also, the FREEDOM Tower was renamed the “One World” Trade Center by the globalist scum….

Yeah, not too encouraging. But still: this is New York, a city most of the rest of the country regards as a pinko freakshow anyway. They’re mostly right.

“How can you imagine that my ancestors would look at someone like Sherman or Sheridan, who conducted the first real scorched-earth campaigns and inflicted such dreadful suffering, and embrace them? in what universe would that make sense?”

In what universe would the Japanese champion an American shogun, MacArthur, after their country was nuked and rendered into a burned down defeated nation faced with starvation? Do you not think they had veterans that were bitter about this and wanted revenge?

If the Japanese rebelled and started killing, assassinating, and attacking Americans like MacArthur, what kind of “Reconstruction” do you think would have happened on the mainland?

The fact that “Democrats” were re-elected after some time, using the violence of the KKK insurgency and terrorism to get back into power, means that not everyone was “disenfranchised”. It was a temporary method, when looking at tomorrow. The Japanese were forced to disarm, suppress martial arts and destroy heritage swords of blood families, write a Constitution, the Emperor and his family were willing to accept stepping down and/or be executed, but the South loved voting rights so much they participated in a Glorious War for Freedom and then lost and now think it is an individual’s duty to use the same kind of violence to get back even more power?

That makes absolutely no sense. General Lee didn’t fight for slavery. Nathan Bedford Forrest didn’t order the KKK he started to burn, lynch, attack, or assassinate Republicans or Northern military or civilian business leaders. NBF told people that “we had lost”, that their path in life would be to pursue prosperity by working with Northerners. The general majority of the South fought because they were ordered to by their Authorities, the Democrat party. Which was allied with Northern Democrats, at least. That is the only explanation I can accept.

Unless there was an authority telling Southerners to fight Reconstruction and destroy it so that people can take over the place in a few years, the violence would not have started, the famines would have stopped, and people working together would have rebuilt. But they didn’t. The Collapse was engineered and then covered up with a bunch of excuses. If the Emperor of Japan gave the order, the Japanese would have fought to the last man, woman, and child. So who Gave the Order to the South to continue fighting the North, causing famine and massive devastation on a national level AFTER the Civil War?

Who was it, Beverly? Do you know? Were you alive during those times? Did you ask anyone that was alive during those times? Or are you, just like me, getting your information from “other people” who may or may not have their own agendas.

The Northern Armies could have been used to reconstruct, but reconstruction would have given the people hope and decreased violence and famine. Instead they spent the majority of the time fighting the KKK, insurgents, and crime. While Democrat Johnson vetoed any Reconstruction bill for years, allowing the famine to go on. As Planned.

I’m not sure why but this site is loading
incredibly slow for me. Is anyone else having this problem or is it a problem on my end?
I’ll check back later and see if the problem still exists.

About Me

Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon. Read More >>